DM Monitoring
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said a truce with Russia covering the Black Sea and en-ergy strikes was effective immediately on Tuesday, but warned that Moscow was already manipulat-ing and distorting the accords.
He said he would ask U.S. President Donald Trump to supply weapons and sanction Russia if Moscow broke the deals. The United States said earlier it had made separate agreements with Kyiv and Moscow to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea and to implement a ban on attacks on energy facilities in the two countries.
“The U.S. side considers that our agreements come into force after their announcement by the U.S. side,” Zelenskiy told reporters at a news conference in Kyiv, adding that he did not trust Russia to hon-our the arrangements. The Ukrainian president, speaking later in his nightly video address, said Russia was already deceiving the world. “Unfortunately, even now, even today, on the very day of negotiations, we see how the Russians have already begun to manipulate,” Zelenskiy said.
“They are already trying to distort agreements and, in fact, deceive both our intermediaries and the entire world.”
He said the Kremlin was lying when it said accords on Black Sea shipping were linked to sanctions im-posed on Moscow. Ukraine, he said, would do everything to implement the accords, but Russia had to understand that it would “receive a strong response” if it launched strikes.
The accords are the first aimed at halting energy strikes since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, triggering Europe’s biggest conflict since World War Two. The fighting rages on across a 1,000-km (600-mile) front line.
In his comments to reporters, the Ukrainian leader said the agreements set out no course of action if Russia broke them and that he would appeal to Trump if that happened.
“We have no faith in the Russians, but we will be constructive,” he said.
He said U.S. officials saw the energy ceasefire as covering attacks on other civilian infrastructure too and that ports should be covered by the Black Sea agreement.
Nightly Russian drone attacks have been a feature of life in big Ukrainian cities for months. So have power outages as missiles hammered the power grid. Kyiv has used drones to hit Russian oil refineries to raise the costs for its larger foe.
Ukraine, Zelenskiy said, presented U.S. officials during talks with a list of facilities that should be cov-ered by the moratorium on energy strikes.
The Kremlin issued a list of Russian and Ukrainian facilities subject to the moratorium on strikes, includ-ing oil refineries, oil and gas pipelines and nuclear power plants.
